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2009 is the year of reality. It’s the year when hype goes away (except for hype about Twitter). When many of us get back to the basics: health, happiness, fitness, family.

We might still believe that the one who dies with the most toys wins, but only a few of us can afford that this year. In previous years I would have already bought several new gadgets. I want a new Apple monitor. A Canon 5D MK II camera. A new Kindle. A new netbook. And on and on.

I have bought none of them, and am hardly alone. This is the year to get back to reality where we buy things when we have the cash and, even then, only after we’ve saved up enough to protect our families against layoffs and all that.

Fear is a powerful motivator and one that we’re all becoming accustomed to living with this year.

Back to reality.

That said, when the MacWorld and Consumer Electronics Shows start in next week you’ll see a new style of gadgets to take on our new “reality.”

In previous years we’d go to gawk at the acres and acres of huge big screens. This year we’re more practical. Plus the geeks who read this probably already have a big HD screen and you’re not about to buy a new one.

Simple, low-cost gadgets that make you much more productive. I’ve already had a preview of several and we’ll have video up later next week about them.

Among them are:

1. Netbooks. Lenovo loaned me a netbook to take to CES, but there are a ton of them coming. Why are they a big deal this year? Well, if your kid needs a computer for school and you’re laid off are you going to buy a $1,500 Macbook or a $300 netbook? I know which one will win that fight in my home.
2. Simpler photo viewing. Your grandparents probably just got an HD screen. But how do you get your photos of your baby onto that screen in a way that grandma can handle? You’ll see several answers this year.
3. Networked “non-geeky” home storage. Nearly every house in the modern world now has a broadband line coming in, along with a router which usually is a wifi access point. Several companies will bring out unique, and easy for everyone to use, storage devices that’ll let you do lots of cool things, especially for photographers. Apple and HP both are rumored to be working on new home media servers and I’m hearing about other ones in the offing, too.
4. GPS is now mature. Thanks to our friends at Broadcom assisted GPS is now 1/8th the size of your thumbnail. What does that mean? Easy: GPS now will be built into everything. I’ll try to meet up with Ford’s CEO to discuss just that and what it means for the car industry. We’ve already seen how Nokia will use maps in cell phones and continue to add location to every datatype that the Nokia N97 will bring out (high res photos, videos, voice, text).
5. Music everywhere. I’m playing with a Sonos right now that they loaned me to prepare for CES. If I could afford it my favorite music could follow me everywhere in my house and, even, when I’m away from the house on my iPhone. So far making that happen was pretty geeky. Now it’s to the point where non-geeky users can do it. Nokia, too, is already delivering cell phones that have all-you-can-eat music subscription plans that are extremely popular in Europe and elsewhere. Will Apple follow? I think they will be forced to eventually.
6. Windows 7. This will be a bigger deal than people are expecting. When I travel I rarely see Macs. This “clean up” of Windows Vista is already getting praises from beta testers (something that rarely happened with Vista) and we haven’t even seen everything that Ray Ozzie’s teams are up to yet.
6B. The year of touch. Everywhere you look you’ll see UI’s that you control by touching them. Microsoft has been working with its OEMs to make the touch capabilities in Windows 7 pretty damn cool. Look for HP, Dell, and Lenovo to bring out new touch computers.
7. HD for everyone. When I bought my HD screen it cost $4,000. Today you can get a better one for $800 and if you are willing to go smaller or to a new brand from a discount chain you can get them for far less. This means that HD is going to be adopted by a whole range of people and they are going to want a gaming console (Xbox is winning) and a way to get their photos and videos up on that screen (several devices are coming out at CES). Apple is rumored to be bringing out a new MacMini, which I still think is the best accessory for hooking onto an HD screen (albeit a bit geeky). Also, I can’t find a FlipCam HD in stock in Silicon Valley, but Jeremy Toeman raves about his (he should know what’s a hot gadget, he has helped launch three “best of CES” companies in the past, including last year’s Bug Labs launch — he already admitted on Twitter that he’s helping Boxee with its CES debut — that’s gotten hot in the past year with 150,000 users).

I’ve noticed a trend lately (actually I noticed it back when I worked at Microsoft and my bosses kept refusing to buy booths at conferences, saying they didn’t return the ROI, but that trend has grown and grown big time). Big companies are throwing their own parties to get news out inside of going to big trade shows. Last night I was at Facebook’s party, where they told everyone they had just passed 140 million users. That deserves a blog post of its own, but we’re here to discuss the trade show crunch.

I’ve watched as Apple invites a few hundred bloggers and journalists into a conference room at its headquarters in Cupertino and gets the news out to the world without having to go to an expensive venue.

What changed?

Blogging and online video.

Big companies are looking at the millions of dollars they spend for booths (not to mention bringing employees to) and are realizing that it’s just not getting the return on investment that they should get.

My sponsor, Seagate, told me they are reducing their spend this year at CES. AMD and Delphi are doing the same thing and I’m hearing about many other companies who will either stop going, or reduce the size of their booths, either this year, if they could, or in 2010 (contracts make it tough to shrink booths as fast as companies might want).